"Step behind that gate and they'll come for you."

Not exactly the words you want to hear when you've just asked the nice clerk to run a criminal records check on you. Let's back up a bit.

I wondered why Brad's calves were bright pink. Standing in a bureaucratic lineup, you have a lot of time to study the feet and legs of the people in front of you. Then, because you are Canadian, you skip a bit and then you can study them again from about the bottom of the shoulder blade to the top of the head. And because this is not merely Canada but Vancouver, the feet of the person in front of you are invariably in white sneakers which feature more advanced technology than the computer we used to send astronauts to the moon. Then white tube socks, with or without racing stripe at the top. Then, because it is, as I said, Vancouver, you have calves; except for me and a couple of holdout bank presidents, Vancouver does not do pants. If it's a man, the calves will be hairy and poking out of manpris or chino shorts; if it's a straight woman, the calves will be waxed and poking out of capri jeans or aforementioned chino shorts; if it's a lesbian, the calves will be hairy and poking out of 14-ounce black denim cargo shorts and will feature a dragon tat. Also, they'll be disappearing into Docs.

And Brad's were coming out of white shoes and white socks, and disappearing into said manpris, but in the middle part, the hairy part, the fleshy part, they were the colour of underripe strawberries.

Which was odd.

But then, I thought, people have all kinds of allergies in the Springtime. Or skin conditions. Or maybe he has congestive heart failure, besides being about twenty years and fifty pounds away from such a thing.

But then I looked at his arms.

Same thing. Pink like nicely-done shrimp.

Back of the neck, shaven head, right up to the part where it disappeared into the (also mandatory in Vancouver) ballcap. Pink like a thirteen-year-old's first corsage. Not the image he was going for, I imagine, when he decided to come down to the Vancouver Police Department and run a CPIC on himself.

He'd filled out the paperwork and checked it twice, just like Santa. And he'd trundled on the bus with the rest of us from The Program (aforementioned, although largely unmentionable) and stood in the Insufferable Lineup of Boredom Except When Excitable Japanese Crankheads Come In to get the paperwork run.

And now, this.

Somehow, although he was blushing crimson in parts by now, he managed to give an impression of blood-drained faintness as he shuffled over to aforesaid gate, it at least not bearing any slogans in Latin. That would have been too much, I think. Not that cops can read Latin. Or, in some cases, much at all.

Five minutes later, the rest of us joined him. They really aught to tell you that's just where they take the fingerprints to finish up the paperwork.